Customer brand loyalty and predominant market share are coveted positions in the product sales industry as a whole. The computer software industry is no exception. Research has shown that people who use a computer software product for a period of time grow accustomed to using that software and are not easily influenced to change to the software product of a competitor. As a result, software companies give customers opportunities to use trial versions of their software products for little or no initial cost. This has proven to be an effective means of gaining market share and repeat customers willing to spend more for unlimited versions of the products.
Software companies place their trial products in the hands of customers in a variety of ways. For example, Internet service providers (“ISPs”) such as AMERICA ONLINE market their products by giving customers free on-line minutes with the expectation of gaining customer loyalty and repeat subscriptions to their service. Unlike other software products, the value in an ISP product is provided by remaining connected to the service. This gives an ISP significant control over the benefits of their product. However, software companies that have less control over the benefits of their trial products mitigate the risk of software piracy by offering trial versions that are diminished in value by restricting the functionality of the software. As a result, the customer does not receive the full product experience, thereby reducing the likelihood of subsequent purchases based on the trial experience.
In order to give customers the full product experience for a minimum cost and mitigate the risk of code piracy, software companies use product activation. Product activation is anti-piracy code that requires customers to connect to a server and receive a license from the software product manufacturer before the trial software product is enabled. Once the trial product is activated it is enabled on the customer computer for a fixed period of time. After the trial period has expired, the functionality of the software product is reduced with the expectation that the customer purchase the non-trial version of the software product at the full price. Reduced functionality permits some use of the product but prohibits saving changes or creating new documents, thereby motivating customers to purchase the non-trial version. In the past, the majority of customers went to retail distributors to purchase non-trial versions of software products, thereby providing profit margins directly to the distributors.
Software product distributors are important to the software sales industry because they place the software in the hands of customers and help software manufacturers build brand loyalty and market share. However, product activation opens opportunities for software manufactures to conduct business directly with the end-user customers. One drawback of product activation technology is that the advent of convertible trials and subscription services threatens software distributor profit margins. Convertible trials and subscription services permit customers to purchase time-limited software from a software distributor or manufacturer at a low cost and then purchase an unlock code for full price directly from the manufacturer to gain or renew access to the non-trial product. Although customers may still purchase non-trial software directly from distributors, purchases directly from the manufacturer could potentially lower profit margins for distributors, put the distributor-manufacturer relationship at risk, and threaten distribution channels for software manufacturers.
Therefore, in light of the above, there is a need for a method, system, apparatus, and computer-readable medium that can provide software customers with the full product experience at a low introductory cost, yet at the same time keep software product distributors involved with the ongoing customer relationship. There is a further need for a trustworthy method, system, apparatus, and computer-readable medium that tracks the distribution of software product sales in order to compensate the distributors.